July 9, 2015

EmBree & Scott on "The Multifarious Nature of Art Forgery in France: Four Case Studies of Belle Époque Fakes and Forgeries" in the Spring 2015 issue of The Journal of Art Crime

Carolyn EmBree and David A. Scott wrote on "The Multifarious Nature of Art Forgery in France: Four Case Studies of Belle Époque Fakes and Forgeries" in the 13th issue of The Journal of Art Crime, in the 2015 Spring Issue, edited by Noah Charney (with Marc Balcells and Christos Tsirogiannis) and published by ARCA.

Here's the abstract for this academic article:

For the insatiable consumer culture that first appeared 19th-century France, fine art objects were among the luxury goods they coveted since these items served as markers of an elevated social status. While this situation certainly created a financial incentive for dishonest art dealers to supplement the elevated demand, issues surrounding art fakery and forgery during the Belle Époque were sometimes more complicated than economic forces during this period. In the pursuit of understanding these more complex issues relating to artistic authenticity, we hope to illustrate that in distancing ourselves from the simplistic notion that profit alone drives art crime, we are better equipped to appreciate the subtleties within the larger notion of art forgery itself. In this article, we present four cases: the Tiara of Saïtapharnès, Mailfert’s furniture, Schuffenecker’s alleged sunflower painting, and the Rodin sculptures of Guy Hain. We will focus on the hermeneutics involved in each of the examples in question, as well as the characteristics that challenge their authenticity. In doing so, we argue that the multifarious nature of these cases serves to further extend the ambit of art forgery, while simultaneously raising the issue of whether such an expansive conception of forgery can negatively color perceptions of the objects and artists it implicates.

Carolyn EmBree is a PhD student in the Department of French and Francophone Studies specializing in nineteenth- century literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

David A. Scott holds a joint appointment in Art History and Archeology, and was founding director of the UCLA/Getty Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation.

In a letter from the editor, Noah Charney explains how The Journal of Art Crime is reaching a wider audience:

Big things are happening for the Journal of Art Crime. After several years courted by a number of academic journal publishers, we have signed on with HeinOnline, a provider of e-edition journals to thousands of libraries around the world, making the JAC accessible via their subscription service to researchers the world over. It remains the more cost-effective method to subscribe to us directly, and the only way to receive print subscriptions, but our goal to disseminate the fine articles in this publication to as many researchers as possible made this a good move.
We are also about to release an essay collection that features work published in the JAC, as well as more than a dozen new essays by over thirty leading international experts, many of whom have already appeared in these pages. The book, entitled Art Crime: Terrorists, Tomb Raiders, Forgers and Thieves will be published by Palgrave towards the end of 2015/start of 2016, and all proceeds from it support ARCA. We are also putting together new symposia for the fall and winter in the UK, so stay tuned for more good things to come.

Here's a link to ARCA's website about access to The Journal of Art Crime.